


Stay With Me (The Fall)

by stopbeingbored



Category: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (TV 2003), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - All Media Types
Genre: Fluff, M/M, Survival, blood cw, comission, injury cw
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-28
Updated: 2016-03-28
Packaged: 2018-05-29 16:27:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,737
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6383890
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stopbeingbored/pseuds/stopbeingbored
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>All Don wanted to do was map that new side-tunnel. Why wouldn't he take his partner along? It's really too bad that the universe has a thing against turtles.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stay With Me (The Fall)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LineCrosser](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LineCrosser/gifts).



> Thank you @momorawrr for the idea. This is my first time writing LH/Don. I really like the ship, which is basically a big Oh No because I should really focus on uni right now. Who am I kidding. I also changed the title a little bit from the original. Hope that's okay.

“I’m sorry,” Don mumbles for the hundredth time that ~~night~~ ~~day~~ night.

He is frustrated. When he is frustrated, he needs something to do with his hands. Dissembling the toaster is a favourite, but the trusty appliance is ~~probably~~ miles away, and anyway it isn’t like Don’s hands are much good right now.

Leatherhead sighs, a puff of warmth in the cold. “Please stop fidgeting,” he says for the hundredth time that ~~???~~ night. Don hears him shift, knows that the process involves a complicated set of movements from extremities far longer than his own body and waits until the noise has stopped before he resumes breathing. Tries to, anyway. His chest hurts; drawing in breaths is difficult. He wishes he could see. It would give his mind something to do instead of tearing itself to shreds.

As if on cue, something flashes in the dark to his left. Don turns his head and squints at it as a warbled, shrill sound echoes through the cavern. It used to be a ringtone. The phone must be lying in a puddle, Don thinks. The fall probably cracked the casing. He needs to fix this before the phone dies. He needs to…

“Donatello,” Leatherhead growls, and Don stills again, his heart hammering against his plastron. Every beat hurts.

“I’m sorry,” he mumbles. He can still see the phone flash, tantalizingly close. On, off. On, off. Then it stops. Maybe it’s better this way. Don couldn’t have reached it anyway, not with the ceiling in the way.

In the newly descending dark, he hears Leatherhead grunt. From one moment to the next, his entire torso is on fire. Don thinks he may be screaming, someone certainly is, incoherent noise amplified by their surroundings until a hand grips his shoulder and it stops. “Breathe,” Leatherhead growls, “Donatello, you need to _breathe_!”

Don obliges, heaves in gulp after gulp of air as his eyes spill over. Whatever was lying on his chest is gone. Slowly, his senses resume their natural functions. He can hear Leatherhead in the dark, breathing almost as heavily as he is. This time, when Don fumbles for something to hold on to, there is no reprimand. After two failed attempts, he manages to find a scaly hand and grasp it. “Thank you,” he whispers. “Leatherhead…”

There is no response, only more of that raspy breathing. Don manages to sit up with painstaking slowness, inch by inch. He can’t move the other arm, but at least that’s not hurting anymore, either. “Leatherhead,” he says again, pushing himself forward on his knees until he bumps into the crocodile’s chest. “Talk to me,” he demands. His eyes are still dripping, a stream of hot wetness on his cheeks. He needs to stop that. Who knows when they will next find water.

Don is trying very hard not to think about all the ways in which their situation is his fault. Part of it is blurry, confused images of speed distorted by pain. It was supposed to be a routine expedition, adding to their exhaustive sewer map a new tunnel that was washed free during last week’s rainstorms. He should have waited for his brothers before entering. He should have secured his phone better. He shouldn’t have let go of the flashlight.

He shouldn’t have brought Leatherhead, who is very large and very heavy and very, very quiet next to him. These days, they go everywhere together, but just this once Don should have stopped to think about it first.

Reaching out with his good hand once more, he follows the line of Leatherhead’s plastron up until it melts into hard, dry scales and then further. The ceiling here must be very low, because his partner’s head is bent. As soon as he has orientated himself, Don places chaste kisses against a jawline the length of his arm, until he can feel strong muscles shift into a smile under his beak.

“Donatello,” Leatherhead whispers. For someone his size, he is extraordinarily soft-spoken. The opposite of Raphael: Always trying to make himself appear smaller than he is. “You can move?”

“Can now, thanks to you,” Don replies. “You blacked out on me for a moment. Stay with me, okay?”

“I did not mean to scare you.”

“Stay awake then,” Don repeats, going for nonchalant but arriving somewhere in strained instead. “What in the shell happened?”

“Cave-in,” Leatherhead says. “You were trapped… I tried to…” His voice breaks again, if from emotional or physical pain, Don cannot say. He wraps his working arm as far around Leatherhead’s neck as he can reach, which is not very far, and hugs him until the shivers have stopped once more. When he steps away, Leatherhead keens softly.

Don trails his hand along the strong muscles of Leatherhead’s upper arm. “You saved me,” he whispers. “Again. Now it is my turn. Let me try to find the phone.”

Now that he can move, it is almost obscenely easy. The shell cell is too far away to reach with his hand, but when Don sticks a leg into the gap between concrete and brick he can just about reach. There is water in the hollow as well, cold and slimy with algae. Not surprising. Down here is _Old_ New York, sewer tunnels older than the oldest skyscrapers. They could lead anywhere.

The light from the screen is too bright in the dark. Don blinks away spots from his vision as he stumbles back to where Leatherhead is sitting. He is greeted with a growl, which he shushes, when he shines the light into yellow eyes.

“Concussed, I think,” he says, trying to keep his tone light. “And… Oh, your hands…”

Leatherhead’s nails are torn, his palms bloodied, leaving smudges where he has placed them gingerly in his lap. He shakes his head when Don bends down to look at them more closely, however. “Donatello, your arm,” he says softly, and Don is reminded of the dull ache in his left shoulder that extends only towards his elbow and no further.

“I am not thinking about that until we are out of here,” he says firmly. Up, as the light reveals, is a no-go of jagged metal and crumbling rock. Behind him, what is left of unmapped side tunnel #92 is effectively blocking their way, but when he turns around the darkness goes on and on in front of him. If Don’s calculations are correct, there are only two possible destinations: the nearest sewer plant, or directly to the sea. “Come on. Let’s go.”

He’s the clever one of his brothers. Leatherhead is pretty much out of it, so it falls to Don to think, and that’s fine, that’s what he _does_. Frankly, it’s embarrassing how long it takes him to remember that phones also function as, well, phones. There’s even a signal. He dials Leo’s number by memory, because the software is going wild. The ringing is too loud in the silent eternity of the sewer tunnel, shrill and broken. Don thinks his brother answers, but the volume is not working properly, so all he gets is the occasional shouted syllable and then more silence. He tells the phone all he knows anyway, what happened, what direction they are going in, just in case. Then he enables flight mode to preserve the battery and trudges on.

They walk. Don can’t tell how long, or how far. The phone tells him the time, but he keeps losing track of the numbers. When Leatherhead stumbles, Don sits with him and they rest for a while. Neither of them talks much, but they stay close together, hands and arms and shoulders brushing as they go. Leatherhead pulls Don close whenever they pause, and even though they are both cold-blooded, Don feels warmer for it.

“I am sorry this is taking a while,” he says at some point.

Leatherhead shakes his head. “I trust you,” he replies softly. “My only regret… is that I am… of not much use right now.”

“Just stay with me,” Don says, suddenly terrified of being alone in this never ending darkness.

“Always,” Leatherhead promises.

And he does, even when he loses coordination of his legs and Don has to support him. Don wouldn’t have believed he had the strength to carry someone like Leatherhead, but somehow he does, the weight against his shell almost comforting for all it threatens to bring him down. Leatherhead holds the phone in his jaws now, because Don still can’t move his left arm. (He still hasn’t looked at the damage.)

The tunnel is slick with algae and empty of any debris. It occurs to Don that under normal circumstances, this place is flooded. It is also ever so slightly going upwards, which makes their journey more difficult.

“Donatello,” Leatherhead whispers.

Don starts; their faces are very close together like this, and Leatherhead’s breath is warm against his skin. It takes him a moment to realize that he is lying on the ground, all weight gone from his back but his mouth full of slimy water.

“I’m alright,” he mumbles, spitting weakly. “Must have… fallen asleep. I’m sorry.”

Leatherhead shakes his head. “So am I,” he says. Rasps. Is that blood in his mouth? “The phone…”

Don’s eyes widen. Pushing himself up is unwise, but he does it anyway, reaching through the spinning vortex that is the world to survey the damage to Leatherhead’s jaw. During their fall he must have closed his mouth, effectively smashing armoured glass and plastic. Leatherhead brushes his hand away when he tries to look for any remaining shards, though. “Later,” he says. “Do not blame yourself. Look how far you have brought us.”

That is an important point. Where is the light coming from? Reluctantly, Don tears his eyes away from the cuts along his partner’s face and squints up ahead. The slope bears the mark of one, then two bodies sliding down it, though not very far. The remains of the phone are a dark spot against the greenish-yellow of the ground, about halfway up, illuminated by the light that is coming in through a grate in the wall.

Don yelps when Leatherhead picks him up and cradles him against his chest like a child. “That is unnecessary,” he protests weakly, but Leatherhead shakes his head and smiles.

“You got us here,” he says. “My Donatello, you have saved us both. But I feel better. Allow me to help.”

Truth be told, Don has no strength left in him to fight. Instead, he nuzzles his head into the crook of Leatherhead’s shoulder and nods. Their skin is very different, large scales against dry leather, but right now they are both smeared with gods know what kind of substances and in the dim light, Don can hardly tell where one begins and the other ends. He is also small enough that his partner can hold him in one arm and right now, feeling smaller still. How lucky he is, he thinks as Leatherhead grunts and rips the metal grate out of the wall with one hand like so much cobweb.

The tunnel ends in a sheer plunge down into a pool filled with putrid water. This is where the flooded tunnels drain themselves, Don realizes. But a jump’s width ahead is a railing, and behind that railing is solid ground, illuminated by a single flickering LED reflecting off the surface of a rusty railway car.

“Subway station,” he mumbles. “Are we that far up?” He hisses as Leatherhead takes a leap and lands on the other side of the railing. His dangling legs are smacking into a scaled chest, making them both wince. How very fitting, he reflects, that when confronted with the options (a) sewer plant and (b) oceanside, the universe would come up with (c) subway just to spite them.

Leatherhead is blinking too much. _Feeling better my shell,_ Don thinks tiredly. “This is a Polo Grounds Shuttle. I am afraid we have a bit further to go yet.”

They both turn in the direction of the barred-up stairwell when they hear a rustle. Don isn’t even surprised to see dozens of eyes stare back at them. Of course they would encounter feral rats on top of everything else. Of course. They follow the pair all the way to the rusty shuttle, where Leatherhead gently puts Don down on the floor and tells him to rest.

“Rats,” Don mumbles, and Leatherhead smiles, exposing his needle-sharp teeth.

“Dinner,” he growls, so loudly that flakes of rust come floating down from the ceiling. The rats are gone faster than they appeared, scuttling feet fading into silence.

Leatherhead huffs, satisfied, and curls up around Don until they lie face to tail to face. For the first time since the fall, Don closes his eyes feeling safe.

**\--=[|]=--**

“…I think is the phone, but they are not there.” Mikey’s voice is coming from very far away.

“They have to be close.” That’s Leo, loud enough to startle Don out of his broken sleep and into sluggish awake-ness. “Look, here are footprints…”

“They are in here,” Raph says, and Don yelps when Leatherhead shifts around him to confront this figure that is blocking out their light now. “Hey – hey, Leatherhead, easy! It’s us!”

Very slowly, Don reaches out with his uninjured hand and pulls Leatherhead’s head around to face him.

“Home,” he whispers.

And in the most anticlimactic ending possible, they go home. That’s fine by Don. Anticlimactic is more than fine, after what turns out to have been fourteen hours of stumbling through pitch blackness. In fact, he thinks that an anti-climax is exactly what he wants from the rest of his life. That, and perhaps a large mug of coffee to go with it.

The sentiment lasts through all of two days of Leo fussing over them both like the overgrown mother hen that he is. The first hours are in shambles whenever Don tries to think about them, which is annoying, flashes of white and the stinging scent of disinfectant. Leatherhead in a bed, asleep; the beeping of monitors; someone saying “shock” in a soft voice. But that, too, passes.

After another dinner of way too much food (“ _we were gone fourteen_ hours _, Mikey, not two_ weeks”), Don curls up on the sofa with an exercise sheet. His left arm is in a cast from shoulder to wrist, but he wants to see if he can’t at least stretch the fingers a bit.

“You should rest,” Leatherhead rumbles behind him. He is carrying two mugs of coffee. Don sighs happily as the sofa bends under his partner’s weight, causing him to slide down the cushion until he is half-lying in Leatherhead’s lap.

“I am,” he mumbles, watching through half-lidded eyes as Leatherhead places the mugs on the coffee table and shifts until he is comfortable. The cuts along Leatherhead’s jaw are healing nicely, some smaller ones already pale scars instead of scabs. One of the positive aspects of mutagen, Don thinks, resisting the urge to reach out and touch them.

“Leonardo wants to go out to that side tunnel again tomorrow,” Leatherhead says, breaking the warm silence between them. Don tenses. “He says they will be especially careful. Please do not fret.”

“I should be there with them,” Don says.

Leatherhead sighs, his tail swishing on the ground before curling around Don’s ankle. “You are staying with me.”

Don briefly thinks about arguing, but truth be told, he is actually looking forward to a quiet day without Hover-Leo. “I suppose I could be persuaded,” he says, smiling when he feels Leatherhead’s chuckle reverberate through his body.

They end up spending the day on the sofa with six hours of _How It’s Made_. Leatherhead’s head is resting on top of Don’s, who is sitting in his lap, running his smaller fingers over Leatherhead’s bigger ones until he has refamiliarized himself with every new mark in the skin. He already knows that Mikey will complain about their choice of show as soon as he comes in, can hear Raph and Leo bicker hours before they return home. As he leans back with a small sigh, Leatherhead shifts against him.

“Is something the matter?” he says, lifting Don’s good hand to his mouth for an absent-minded kiss.

Don shakes his head. “I was just thinking that it’s good to be home.”

And Leatherhead holds him a bit more tightly and hums.

 


End file.
